Author: peakery

Now featuring 587,000 peaks!

This update adds 250,000 new peaks to the existing 337,000 for a grand total of over half a million peaks. Some countries gained a huge number of new peaks. Here are the top 25 countries that gained the most peaks:

Overall we added peaks to 195 countries and territories; go to the Regions page to check out any of these. We plan to add more peaks over time.

Improved summit locations & elevations

Since the launch of the new peakery, we’ve also fixed the locations of over 72,000 peaks and the elevation of more than 16,000 peaks. This is on top of the 1000s of valuable contributions from the peakery community.

Why we’re doing this

peakery’s long-term goal is to become the world’s ultimate resource to plan, collect, and share your mountain hiking & climbing adventures. An important ingredient in this is accurate and comprehensive info for every mountain in the world. It’s going to take years of constant improvement to get there, but with your help we plan to keep chipping away at it.

peakery’s long-term goal is to become the world’s ultimate resource to plan, collect, and share your mountain hiking & climbing adventures. An important ingredient in this is accurate and comprehensive info for every mountain in the world. It’s going to take years of constant improvement to get there, but with your help we plan to keep chipping away at it.

Huge cleanup of regions
In line with that, we just released a major cleanup of peakery’s worldwide regions info. Previously, over 1,000 peaks had no country and over 60,000 had no region. Even worse, a huge number of peaks were assigned to outdated or incorrect regions. We fixed all of that in 249 countries/territories and almost 4,000 regions.

Country maps come to life
Now with updated regions, every country’s geochart shows its regions fully colored in. A few examples of how much better these look:

Faster loading region pages
While we were in here, we greatly reduced the loading time of all of the regions pages. If you experience a really slow regions page (> 5 sec to load) please let us know and we’ll take another look.

Streamlined peak approval
With the new regions in place we’ll be able to respond to new peak submissions much faster. Before, we’d often need to manually assign regions to submitted peaks, but now they’ll be auto-assigned.

A good topo map is essential to understanding mountainous terrain. And as any map lover will tell you, it’s just fun to look at. Thanks to CalTopo, peakery members can see highly detailed topo maps in the US, Canada, and New Zealand. Just select the Topo (US/CA/NZ) view on the upper right corner of the map:

the Topo map view provides great detail for US, Canada, and New Zealand (click for fullsize)

But what about the rest of the world? For this we’re excited to offer a new highly detailed topo map view: Outdoors. In many countries, the Outdoors map view provides vastly more details on peaks, trails, and mountainous terrain than the existing Google Terrain view. Here’s a quick comparison (click to see full details):

the new global Outdoors topo map view (click for fullsize)compare to the same place in Google Terrain view. (click for fullsize)

Along with other recently launched map features of the new peakery— Summits & Difficulty filters, bigger map views, mobile and tablet support— we hope that this global topo map makes peakery’s maps even more useful as you plan your next mountain adventures. Please let us know at feedback@peakery.com if you have any ideas to make peakery’s mountain maps even better.

For those that want the details, here’s the full list of bugs we’ve fixed since launch:

Summit logs:
1. improved photo uploading that fixes errors, doubles upload speed, allows multiple photo selection, and automatically senses file errors before fully uploading.
2. improved elevation gain calculations with smoothing of tracks and minimum uphill/downhill trends concept to smooth out tiny fluctuations on a rolling route
3. fixed incorrect metric units conversion in logs
4. fixed 500 error when submit elevation or prominence in meters
5. fixed datepicker UI issues in Windows Chrome and Edge browsers
6. fixed new routes not available to select when logging a climb
7. fixed 500 error when adding a new route to a log
8. fixed errors logging and editing logs
9. fixed issue with saving edited logs
10. fixed issue with save button being inactive when add a route to a log
11. fixed error when trying to upload a GPX file
12. fixed issue preventing removing a log
13. fixed error when trying to remove a GPX file
14. fixed issue preventing removing distance, elevation, and time values from logs
15. fixed issue preventing removing photos from logs
16. fixed issue that showed uploaded photos on site even when a member abandoned logging part way through
17. in comments linked usernames to the member’s pages
18. fixed issue causing all hearts to always show up red on a peak’s Summits page
19. fixed issue with photo captions not showing up in the fullsize photo viewer
20. changed all GPX tracks to red color to be consistent throughout site
21. added the “Elevation start” stat to the Elevation box
22. fixed issue that didn’t show photos that had spaces in their filenames
23. fixed issue that didn’t allow save of photo captions when editing a log
24. fixed a bug in how handling some GPX files that prevented uploading them
25. fixed peak map markers infowindows on mobile
26. replaced the red peak marker with the orange version to be consistent throughout site
27. fixed a timezone issue that caused the number of days shown on logs to sometimes be wrong
28. fixed issue to update stats when remove and re-add a GPX file
29. fixed the order of photos shown in summit logs

Member profiles:
30. fixed error with Days since last climb always showing 0
31. fixed peak photos not showing on “Nearest to home” goal
32. changed the info page to only show photos from your summit logs (instead of all photos you contribute)
33. fixed incorrect Home Basecamp location mappings
34. fixed issue with map not centering on home basecamp when click the name of the Home Basecamp or the Completion radius box map
35. changed when click the Completion radius stat now goes to Peaks table view
36. removed case sensitivity in member page URLs
37. changed definition of Winter to include all of Mar 20 since some users weren’t getting Winter grid credit because the Vernal Equinox time varies every year
38. fixed issue showing multiple badges for the same peak
39. fixed issue with badge images not showing up because of spaces in image names
40. fixed issues with badges showing incorrect King of Mountains
41. fixed issue showing First Ascents on badges when multiple members logged a peak on the same day
42. fixed members’ Challenge maps not showing the correct completed peaks

Add missing peak:
66. fixed bug related to not specifying a peak name when adding a missing peak
67. changed format of auto peak names to Peak 1234 m (or Peak 1234 ft in US)
68. unlinked the other peak markers on the map to prevent leaving form
69. use meters by default for elevation and prominence if the Map page was previously centered outside of US

Routes:
70. fixed distance to summit showing 0.0 when added a route GPX and then adjusted
71. fixed a bunch of errors when adding GPX files
72. removed the constraint that a GPX must require time data
73. fixed routes showing incorrect number of summits
74. added link to Google Maps directions in the Getting there section of route detail pages
75. if peak outside of US, select the meters unit for elevation and prominence by default when adding or editing a route
76. fixed issue with some characters causing errors in Route Highlights

Search/Peaks page
86. fixed non-alpha characters breaking search
87. fixed error in number of You summits shown
88. fixed bad scrolling behavior when clicking pagination link
89. fixed error when searched for a peak name and US state name

Members:
90. linked the entire header of each member card to their profile
91. fixed error when viewing some pages
92. added pagination to members list

Maps:
93. fixed infowindows popping up at wrong locations when map area shows the international date line
94. Prime Meridian Bug™: fixed bug when peaks vanish when map shows both the PM and IDL
95. fixed issue with some challenge maps not showing all peaks in the challenge
96. fixed issue with bad character in a peak name causing no peaks to load in Challenge map
97. fixed issue pushing zoom buttons off edge of screen in Windows Chrome

Other:
98. fixed reset password to first check if email account is registered with peakery
99. fixed members without passwords not able to reset password (members who signed up with Facebook)
100. changed the focus to the username field when login on desktop
101. don’t show a News item when a user likes their own summit log
101. added a 500 Internal Server Error page

After climbing many false-summits, the new peakery is finally ready to go!

THIS IS BIG. A complete ground-up redesign. We’ve re-thought every feature and added many, many more. Internally we’ve called this effort Project Shasta, named after the massive volcano in northern California. Because just like Shasta, the new peakery is massive in scope… we’ve packed in so much new stuff.

Top 10 new things in peakery:

Nearly everything

The new peakery includes over 100 new page designs

If you’re a long-time peakery member, we hope your first reaction upon seeing the new peakery is “Whoa!” (a good whoa). The first thing you’ll notice is that it looks a lot different. But far from just a fresh coat of paint, we’ve taken extra time to reimagine every single feature to better organize and showcase the growing number of incredible mountain experiences shared by our members. 100% of your existing data is in here but now it’s presented in hugely improved ways with bigger photos and useful filters and sorts throughout the site. And all the parts underneath that “just make it work” have been overhauled with modern technologies to set peakery up for constant improvements in the future.

Use on your phone & tablet too. Hello 2017!

The old peakery was nearly impossible to use on your phone or tablet. Despite this, 47% of people tried. Ouch. The new peakery addresses this with 3 separate designs: 1 for desktops/laptops, 1 for tablets, and 1 for phones. In addition to scaling to the appropriate screen size, we’ve added phone-only features like adding photos from your phone’s photo library, seeing your current location on the map, and getting turn-by-turn directions to trailheads.

Add your GPS tracks

One of the most requested features: now you can add your GPS tracks to your summit logs. Adding your track will auto-populate stats in your summit log for distance, time, and vertical gain.

Summit routes

A central goal of the new peakery is to be a great resource for anyone to find the info they need to go out and climb mountains. To that end, members may now contribute detailed route info for any mountain in the world. Routes may include key info such as GPS tracks, stats, difficulty, popularity, maps, step-by-step descriptions & photos, directions to the start, and more. All of this route info enables new features such as filtering summits by difficulty, seeing only summits logged on a particular route, and capturing personal stats like your total vertical gain and difficulty breakdown.

With ongoing contributions from our community, we hope to grow peakery into a comprehensive resource for route info for peaks around the world.

See the latest in your region

Latest summits in Alberta, Canada

On the old peakery it was hard to discover the latest summits in regions you care about. To address this, we changed the homepage to feature the latest activity in your home region (or any region in the world). It’s a quick overview of what’s been happening in the mountains, something to check before you head out… or to browse when you’re stuck inside.

Summit logs 2.0

Part of the new summit log

One of the central activities on peakery is logging your climbs. So we spent a lot of time working on improving it in 2 main ways: 1) making logging easier, and 2) letting you log new types of info. New features include:

Faster with easy 1-page logging (works on your phone too).

Add photos directly from your phone.

Add your GPS track.

Add distance, elevation, and time stats (auto-populated if you add your GPS track).

Earn new King of the Mountain & Summit Steward Awards

In the spirit of friendly competition, we’re introducing 2 new types of peakery awards for peaks you climb frequently:

King of the Mountain Award:

Summit a peak more times than any other member. Only 1 available per peak. Beware: this award can be lost!

Summit Steward Award:

Summit a peak at least 5 times to become one of its Summit Stewards. As Steward of a peak, you’re encouraged to keep that peak’s info up-to-date on peakery and spread goodwill on your future climbs up the peak.

Shiny new peak pages

Part of the new Mount Assiniboine page

The over 330,000 peak pages are the crux of peakery… so we made them better with a complete overhaul:

Bigger photos.

Expandable maps right in the page.

New editable highlights section.

New 3D Map view (no browser plug-ins required!).

New page for summit logs with powerful filters.

New Routes page featuring summit routes for that peak.

Peak Challenges

The Las Vegas Local 10 Peak Challenge is a stepping-stone to other Las Vegas Peak Challenges.

Peak Challenges take the age-old concept of peak lists and make them far more accessible, achievable, and progressive. This translates into many new challenges close to cities with a smaller number of peaks — anywhere from 5 to 20 peaks usually of low difficulty. These challenges serve as stepping-stones to progressively more involved challenges that’ll keep even the truly obsessed busy.

For each of the over280 featured Peak Challenges, we’ve added pages for detailed info and stats, maps, member progress, and related summits. Near many cities, Peak Challenges start with smaller collections of peaks — anywhere from 5 to 20 peaks of low difficulty.

Map enhancements such as a bigger map area with full-width view, new sliders for Summits and Difficulty, and a way to jump to your current location when using your phone or tablet.

Big thanks

Thanks to those who’ve contributed to improving peakery so far. Your steady stream of data improvements make peakery a more valuable guide to the world’s mountains. And a special thanks to those who gave feedback on early concepts of this new peakery; we incorporated many of your ideas.

What’s next?

Our goal with peakery is to get more people to climb more mountains. While this new peakery is a summit of sorts, there are many more summits ahead as we work with the peakery community to continue to advance this goal.

In 2017 we’re planning to release batches of new stuff every few weeks. Some of the first batches will focus on peak data, maps, and photos.

Feedback

We could really use your feedback as we work to iron out kinks and round out features. And let us know what else you’d like to see, as long as it doesn’t involve adding dancing meerkats to your summit photos or anything like that.